“It became the most important test - to make a steel car with a face that conveys emotions”
In Disney and Pixar's “Cars” animation tape (directed by John Lasseter, assistant director Joe Ranft), cars don't live in the human world — the world was created for them separately.
Insects here - "Volkswagen" with wings. Flowers look like red lilies, but in reality they are the rear side lights of cars. Tractors are painted like cows. The mountain forms resemble the rear wings of the Cadillacs, towering from the wormwood-covered steppes. Cirrus clouds look like traces from the tread, and if you look closely, you can see clouds in the form of cars with smoke from the exhaust pipes.
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“The idea was to imagine how machines, if they were living organisms, would perceive themselves in this world,” says Bill Cohn, assistant designer Bob Poulie. “I once thought of beating car forms in wildlife, and this became the main concept of design. I began to look for all sorts of funny metaphors. ”
The action begins late in the evening, on the racetrack in Northern California, when the main character, McQueen, nicknamed “Lightning” (a self-confident young car, voiced by actor Owen Wilson) finishes with two more cars at the same time in the Piston Cup race. Because of this, McQueen will have to go from California to the desert somewhere in the Southwest. There, with the help of the residents of the town, Radiator Springs will understand that to be the first to cross the finish line is not the most important thing in life, the main thing is the pleasure of the trip. The cartoon ends with a final race for the cup in California.
Koni's work on creating the atmosphere of a cartoon: lighting and concept images, began with pastel sketches. “Everything was done manually,” he says. “My work began with dark blue sketches on paper. Someone at the same time sculpted the details of the landscape from clay. ”
For research purposes, he and his colleagues, designers, and screenwriters traveled on nine Cadillacs on Route 66 from Oklahoma to California. During the trip, they were simply fascinated by the famous roadside motels. Thus, one of them became a huge garage and turned into a motel Radiator Springs Kozi Kohn. The manager of the motel, Sally Carrera (Bonnie Hunt), the Porsche 911, met McQueen when he broke into the town.
In “Cars”, even the highway became metaphoric when Kohn took over. "Freeway is a rut through space," says Kohn. She is ruthless, she goes through everything that stands in her way. In order to express this, Cohn cut the motorway city of Mesa. “A small part on one side and the rest of the city on the other. The highway could have been laid around the city, but it seemed to say: the goal was to get from point A to point B, you should not enjoy the ride.
But the old highway 66 runs along the contours of the landscape, skirting obstacles.
During the study of the external landscape of the Radiator Springs, Cohn was inspired by the paintings of Maynard Dixon. “He had the gift of conveying the South-West by simple means,” Cohn notes. “He attached great importance to the brightness of his works, so they are so sunny with him. Even in stylized landscapes, he felt the weather and the lighting of the area very subtly. ”
Kon is inclined to call landscapes in “Wheelbarrows” more naturalistic than realistic. He believes that the main advantage of computer graphics over the film is that you can play with lighting and ensure that the image resembles the way nature sees the human eye, and not the camera lens. “You may think that the graphics of the“ Cars ”cartoon are photorealistic, but we worked precisely to get away from photographicism towards a natural, seemingly eye-like image,” says Cohn.
Keeping in mind the pictures of Dixon, Cohn created scenes of action, which he himself called “illuminated surroundings,” and Pixar created the instrument in order to achieve this effect. “The environment is such that the color could change depending on whether there was dust or dirt in the air,” explains Kohn. New gaseous models were generated. Chief Technical Officer Iben Ostbay called them "aerosol gases" - smoke and dust.
The leader of the special effects development team, Steve May, created dust and smoke using two types of particle simulators. In order to make the dust pillar following the machines in the panoramic frames, the team used a powerful tool to give small elements a twist effect. For close-ups, they used a simple movement of particles, which was achieved using the Maya program and the simplest tool RenderMan.
The methods used to transmit the neon lights in the city were also useful for illuminating exterior landscapes. “Light can be a field, an area, or a form,” says Kohn. “The sky can be a source of light. Any object can be a source of color that is reflected everywhere. The object becomes a light-emitting, color-transmitting object - it looks like ray tracing, on the contrary. ”
The studio used PRMan, the commercial version of RenderMan software. Since the machines needed a reflection, they decided to use the ray tracing made in PRMan throughout the film. Ray tracing in night scenes with floodlight gave the effect that Cohn calls "billions of reflections." The same technique allowed the use of two more techniques in order to achieve the naturalism that Cohn wanted so much. External occlusion allowed creating cracks and exact forms of objects, and radial diffusion allowed playing with reflection of the color of one object in another.
Prior to “Wheelbarrows,” Pixar studio generated shadow maps using a camera. With external occlusion and radial diffusion, shadows began to respond to colors.
“If you look at the parking lot,” Cohn explains: “then you will see that the shadow under the car is much darker because there is no sky from under the car. However, the shadow next to the car has a blue tint. The shadows in “Cars” are revolutionary because they are dynamic and change depending on the color of the object that is casting them. Amazingly, we managed to achieve this. Artists would have worked on it for ages.
In addition to all this, the tools with which objects were generated allow you to change the color and contrast of shadows depending on the distance to the camera.
“When you take off the light and the shadow, the objects in the shadow always lose their colors,” says Kon. "In life, the eye compensates for the difference between color and shadow, but on the film you have to put the correct exposure in such scenes."
“With CG you can slightly lower the light value in the lighted areas in order to keep the colors in the shade. Thus, you create naturalism, not subject to film. People think that this is realism, but I call it naturalism. That’s how your eye sees the light. ”
Illuminators working with tools created by the studio Pixar, can control the light and shadows interactively.
A scanned image of pastel sketches made by Kohn and photographs of clay models of the landscape allow the rest of the team to see the world through his eyes. During the production of the cartoon, Kohn often corrected the sketches made using Photoshop , adding new details.
“It was like a course adjustment,” he recalls. “For example, a person modeling an abyss and precipices may have questions about the exact place where the terrain changes. Drawing becomes a way to explain ideas without modeling. We seem to be moving from production back to development. ”
When McQueen accidentally hits Radiator Springs, he has to slow down his hectic life in order to do some repairs. In order to feel the spirit of Radiator Springs, Cohn spent a lot of time in small cities in eastern California and towns at the old silver mines in the Nevada desert. “You never know what you'll find,” says Cohn. "We discovered the language of architecture and design, originating from real objects."
In these old towns he saw grass growing from the cracks of the pavement, signs painted on old brick buildings, decorated gas stations. All this had an impact on the design of the cartoon. But the main thing - it is a parcel to the automotive theme. A shoe store in Radiator Springs sells tires. The Eight-Café Cafe at Flo has a petrol station. The canopies above the columns are similar to the covers of the valve mechanism, and the cafe itself is like an eight-cylinder engine. The main entrance to Radiator Springs is, of course, like a radiator, and above it in a rose window the old thermometer from the Ford T.
Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), a local doctor / mechanic working together and a city judge, sits in the courthouse. Doc - 1951 Hudson Hornet. The other main characters are Maitre (Larry The Cable Guy) - a rusty old tractor with the fastest winch in Carburetor County; Fillmore (George Carlin) - 1960 Volkswagen brewing its own organic fuel and Serge (Paul Dooley) is an army jeep of the Second World War.
The characters of this three-dimensional animation have eyes on the windshield and mouth in place of the grille. Otherwise, they behave like cars. They have no noses, and they do not walk on two legs.
“All the time the cartoon was produced, John [Lasseter] talked about“ accurate transfer of matter, ”says James Ford Murphy, one of the four main animators. “We knew that the environment would look real or too real, so we needed to faithfully pass on everything else to connect the two worlds. We adore the Disney animated film "Susie, the Little Blue Coupe" . We wanted to do the same. But our heroes are not as cartoony as Suzy. We could not allow the machines to bend and shrink - it would not seem like they were made of metal. So the main test for us was the bending of six tons of steel and iron endowed with a person who is obliged to transmit all possible emotions. ”
The film worked at different times from 40 to 50 animators. Studio Pixar broke the tape into several parts, and parts in turn into scenes. The main animators made the most of the animators in their team. Each animator worked on all the characters in the scene. “We tried to do as many scenes as possible at the same time, so the animators were filled with a sense of belonging,” says Murphy. “For each there is something in the film, some valuable part created by him. It also gives a sense of rhythm, because small episodes are easier to make. ”
The R & D team created one model with which it was possible to make all the other machines. Animators could customize the engine and suspension for each car. “We could make a route, and the car followed it, as if it were real,” recalls Murphy. "We played up this model in order to make it even more" automotive "- how it drives, how it reacts to the grip of its tires." Since, for example, police tires are softer than usual, the 1949 Mercury Polis Cruiser drives differently than McQueen, who has racing tires and an elastic suspension.
Despite the fact that the animators used tools that convey the real physics of the adhesion of rubber to the road, they constantly manually adjusted the appearance and habits of cars. They also had to manually draw the faces of cars. Models built from component parts were easy to customize so that animators could make them multi-functional. But they did not do that. “We realized that the less we try to give a cartoon effect, the more effective and more accurate the animation looks,” says Murphy. “Maitre and Luigi, a rusty tractor and a small Fiat, have always been more animated than the old and hard Hud Paul Newman. Luigi is constantly spinning, moving fast. But still, we thought: “This is not a cartoon character, this is a car. This is car".
In the course of the film, the animators continued to learn to combine real cars and cartoon characters in one car. The mouth of the cars moves, the eyes move on the windshield. To add expressiveness to the eyes, eyebrows made of metal over the windshield and eyelids were invented, so the cars began to blink. Men's eyelids angular with a notch in the middle, women's eyebrows are soft and rounded. Otherwise, cars would generally be little different from real ones.
“The two best finds were how the tires stopped and how the cars played while standing still,” says Murphy. Animators realized that they could not just put the car on the brake and make it freeze. They had to force the wheel models to roll back and forth for weight transfer. And when the cars were unwound, they squeezed and unclenched the tires and swayed a little, in order to remind the audience that they were alive.
Animators also learned restraint. “We had no arms and legs, so we had to find smart solutions for gestures with tires,” says Murphy. “We worked with simple models that have few details. I wanted to use their full ability to compress, unclench and bend. But when we saw the cars on the big screen in all details, with all the textures, we realized how much we were wrong. ”
The sign language created by the trial and error methods satisfied the maximum requirements of Lasseter. “We did not forget about John’s mantra about“ maximum precision of matter, ”says Cohn. “We could easily make cars flexible and nimble, but metal is always metal.”
This was the most important test - to make a steel car with a face that conveys emotions - but it also became the most fascinating part of the work for Murphy. “At first it seemed simply impossible,” he says. “Many people outside of Pixar laughed at our avtoideya. But this is called animation. Animation is 24 frames per second of a magical act that creates the illusion of life. If you understand how to make this magical device, if there is a script, artists, technical capabilities, the magic lives by itself. You can prove to ill-wishers that they are wrong. You can not only make a great cartoon about cars, you can make you believe that the characters are alive. And then you will love this story. ”
It remains to wait for the new creation Pixar - WALL-E , which will be released only in June next year.
Insects here - "Volkswagen" with wings. Flowers look like red lilies, but in reality they are the rear side lights of cars. Tractors are painted like cows. The mountain forms resemble the rear wings of the Cadillacs, towering from the wormwood-covered steppes. Cirrus clouds look like traces from the tread, and if you look closely, you can see clouds in the form of cars with smoke from the exhaust pipes.
')
“The idea was to imagine how machines, if they were living organisms, would perceive themselves in this world,” says Bill Cohn, assistant designer Bob Poulie. “I once thought of beating car forms in wildlife, and this became the main concept of design. I began to look for all sorts of funny metaphors. ”
The action begins late in the evening, on the racetrack in Northern California, when the main character, McQueen, nicknamed “Lightning” (a self-confident young car, voiced by actor Owen Wilson) finishes with two more cars at the same time in the Piston Cup race. Because of this, McQueen will have to go from California to the desert somewhere in the Southwest. There, with the help of the residents of the town, Radiator Springs will understand that to be the first to cross the finish line is not the most important thing in life, the main thing is the pleasure of the trip. The cartoon ends with a final race for the cup in California.
Koni's work on creating the atmosphere of a cartoon: lighting and concept images, began with pastel sketches. “Everything was done manually,” he says. “My work began with dark blue sketches on paper. Someone at the same time sculpted the details of the landscape from clay. ”
For research purposes, he and his colleagues, designers, and screenwriters traveled on nine Cadillacs on Route 66 from Oklahoma to California. During the trip, they were simply fascinated by the famous roadside motels. Thus, one of them became a huge garage and turned into a motel Radiator Springs Kozi Kohn. The manager of the motel, Sally Carrera (Bonnie Hunt), the Porsche 911, met McQueen when he broke into the town.
In “Cars”, even the highway became metaphoric when Kohn took over. "Freeway is a rut through space," says Kohn. She is ruthless, she goes through everything that stands in her way. In order to express this, Cohn cut the motorway city of Mesa. “A small part on one side and the rest of the city on the other. The highway could have been laid around the city, but it seemed to say: the goal was to get from point A to point B, you should not enjoy the ride.
But the old highway 66 runs along the contours of the landscape, skirting obstacles.
During the study of the external landscape of the Radiator Springs, Cohn was inspired by the paintings of Maynard Dixon. “He had the gift of conveying the South-West by simple means,” Cohn notes. “He attached great importance to the brightness of his works, so they are so sunny with him. Even in stylized landscapes, he felt the weather and the lighting of the area very subtly. ”
Kon is inclined to call landscapes in “Wheelbarrows” more naturalistic than realistic. He believes that the main advantage of computer graphics over the film is that you can play with lighting and ensure that the image resembles the way nature sees the human eye, and not the camera lens. “You may think that the graphics of the“ Cars ”cartoon are photorealistic, but we worked precisely to get away from photographicism towards a natural, seemingly eye-like image,” says Cohn.
Keeping in mind the pictures of Dixon, Cohn created scenes of action, which he himself called “illuminated surroundings,” and Pixar created the instrument in order to achieve this effect. “The environment is such that the color could change depending on whether there was dust or dirt in the air,” explains Kohn. New gaseous models were generated. Chief Technical Officer Iben Ostbay called them "aerosol gases" - smoke and dust.
The leader of the special effects development team, Steve May, created dust and smoke using two types of particle simulators. In order to make the dust pillar following the machines in the panoramic frames, the team used a powerful tool to give small elements a twist effect. For close-ups, they used a simple movement of particles, which was achieved using the Maya program and the simplest tool RenderMan.
The methods used to transmit the neon lights in the city were also useful for illuminating exterior landscapes. “Light can be a field, an area, or a form,” says Kohn. “The sky can be a source of light. Any object can be a source of color that is reflected everywhere. The object becomes a light-emitting, color-transmitting object - it looks like ray tracing, on the contrary. ”
The studio used PRMan, the commercial version of RenderMan software. Since the machines needed a reflection, they decided to use the ray tracing made in PRMan throughout the film. Ray tracing in night scenes with floodlight gave the effect that Cohn calls "billions of reflections." The same technique allowed the use of two more techniques in order to achieve the naturalism that Cohn wanted so much. External occlusion allowed creating cracks and exact forms of objects, and radial diffusion allowed playing with reflection of the color of one object in another.
Prior to “Wheelbarrows,” Pixar studio generated shadow maps using a camera. With external occlusion and radial diffusion, shadows began to respond to colors.
“If you look at the parking lot,” Cohn explains: “then you will see that the shadow under the car is much darker because there is no sky from under the car. However, the shadow next to the car has a blue tint. The shadows in “Cars” are revolutionary because they are dynamic and change depending on the color of the object that is casting them. Amazingly, we managed to achieve this. Artists would have worked on it for ages.
In addition to all this, the tools with which objects were generated allow you to change the color and contrast of shadows depending on the distance to the camera.
“When you take off the light and the shadow, the objects in the shadow always lose their colors,” says Kon. "In life, the eye compensates for the difference between color and shadow, but on the film you have to put the correct exposure in such scenes."
“With CG you can slightly lower the light value in the lighted areas in order to keep the colors in the shade. Thus, you create naturalism, not subject to film. People think that this is realism, but I call it naturalism. That’s how your eye sees the light. ”
Illuminators working with tools created by the studio Pixar, can control the light and shadows interactively.
A scanned image of pastel sketches made by Kohn and photographs of clay models of the landscape allow the rest of the team to see the world through his eyes. During the production of the cartoon, Kohn often corrected the sketches made using Photoshop , adding new details.
“It was like a course adjustment,” he recalls. “For example, a person modeling an abyss and precipices may have questions about the exact place where the terrain changes. Drawing becomes a way to explain ideas without modeling. We seem to be moving from production back to development. ”
When McQueen accidentally hits Radiator Springs, he has to slow down his hectic life in order to do some repairs. In order to feel the spirit of Radiator Springs, Cohn spent a lot of time in small cities in eastern California and towns at the old silver mines in the Nevada desert. “You never know what you'll find,” says Cohn. "We discovered the language of architecture and design, originating from real objects."
In these old towns he saw grass growing from the cracks of the pavement, signs painted on old brick buildings, decorated gas stations. All this had an impact on the design of the cartoon. But the main thing - it is a parcel to the automotive theme. A shoe store in Radiator Springs sells tires. The Eight-Café Cafe at Flo has a petrol station. The canopies above the columns are similar to the covers of the valve mechanism, and the cafe itself is like an eight-cylinder engine. The main entrance to Radiator Springs is, of course, like a radiator, and above it in a rose window the old thermometer from the Ford T.
Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), a local doctor / mechanic working together and a city judge, sits in the courthouse. Doc - 1951 Hudson Hornet. The other main characters are Maitre (Larry The Cable Guy) - a rusty old tractor with the fastest winch in Carburetor County; Fillmore (George Carlin) - 1960 Volkswagen brewing its own organic fuel and Serge (Paul Dooley) is an army jeep of the Second World War.
The characters of this three-dimensional animation have eyes on the windshield and mouth in place of the grille. Otherwise, they behave like cars. They have no noses, and they do not walk on two legs.
“All the time the cartoon was produced, John [Lasseter] talked about“ accurate transfer of matter, ”says James Ford Murphy, one of the four main animators. “We knew that the environment would look real or too real, so we needed to faithfully pass on everything else to connect the two worlds. We adore the Disney animated film "Susie, the Little Blue Coupe" . We wanted to do the same. But our heroes are not as cartoony as Suzy. We could not allow the machines to bend and shrink - it would not seem like they were made of metal. So the main test for us was the bending of six tons of steel and iron endowed with a person who is obliged to transmit all possible emotions. ”
The film worked at different times from 40 to 50 animators. Studio Pixar broke the tape into several parts, and parts in turn into scenes. The main animators made the most of the animators in their team. Each animator worked on all the characters in the scene. “We tried to do as many scenes as possible at the same time, so the animators were filled with a sense of belonging,” says Murphy. “For each there is something in the film, some valuable part created by him. It also gives a sense of rhythm, because small episodes are easier to make. ”
The R & D team created one model with which it was possible to make all the other machines. Animators could customize the engine and suspension for each car. “We could make a route, and the car followed it, as if it were real,” recalls Murphy. "We played up this model in order to make it even more" automotive "- how it drives, how it reacts to the grip of its tires." Since, for example, police tires are softer than usual, the 1949 Mercury Polis Cruiser drives differently than McQueen, who has racing tires and an elastic suspension.
Despite the fact that the animators used tools that convey the real physics of the adhesion of rubber to the road, they constantly manually adjusted the appearance and habits of cars. They also had to manually draw the faces of cars. Models built from component parts were easy to customize so that animators could make them multi-functional. But they did not do that. “We realized that the less we try to give a cartoon effect, the more effective and more accurate the animation looks,” says Murphy. “Maitre and Luigi, a rusty tractor and a small Fiat, have always been more animated than the old and hard Hud Paul Newman. Luigi is constantly spinning, moving fast. But still, we thought: “This is not a cartoon character, this is a car. This is car".
In the course of the film, the animators continued to learn to combine real cars and cartoon characters in one car. The mouth of the cars moves, the eyes move on the windshield. To add expressiveness to the eyes, eyebrows made of metal over the windshield and eyelids were invented, so the cars began to blink. Men's eyelids angular with a notch in the middle, women's eyebrows are soft and rounded. Otherwise, cars would generally be little different from real ones.
“The two best finds were how the tires stopped and how the cars played while standing still,” says Murphy. Animators realized that they could not just put the car on the brake and make it freeze. They had to force the wheel models to roll back and forth for weight transfer. And when the cars were unwound, they squeezed and unclenched the tires and swayed a little, in order to remind the audience that they were alive.
Animators also learned restraint. “We had no arms and legs, so we had to find smart solutions for gestures with tires,” says Murphy. “We worked with simple models that have few details. I wanted to use their full ability to compress, unclench and bend. But when we saw the cars on the big screen in all details, with all the textures, we realized how much we were wrong. ”
The sign language created by the trial and error methods satisfied the maximum requirements of Lasseter. “We did not forget about John’s mantra about“ maximum precision of matter, ”says Cohn. “We could easily make cars flexible and nimble, but metal is always metal.”
This was the most important test - to make a steel car with a face that conveys emotions - but it also became the most fascinating part of the work for Murphy. “At first it seemed simply impossible,” he says. “Many people outside of Pixar laughed at our avtoideya. But this is called animation. Animation is 24 frames per second of a magical act that creates the illusion of life. If you understand how to make this magical device, if there is a script, artists, technical capabilities, the magic lives by itself. You can prove to ill-wishers that they are wrong. You can not only make a great cartoon about cars, you can make you believe that the characters are alive. And then you will love this story. ”
It remains to wait for the new creation Pixar - WALL-E , which will be released only in June next year.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/16441/
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